It's the homestretch and after that, the next countdown, though we more than likely won't be writing about it, is the one of the number of days until the first Spring Training game.

In this installment of our countdown, I'm cheating slightly and reposting something I wrote about Mickey Mantle's 1956 season. It was posted on High Heat Stats a couple of weeks back and I thought it would be a good post for today. So enjoy!

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I once saw a tweet that mentioned Mickey Mantle‘s OPS+ in his second to last season as a player – it was 149. The person was impressed by the number. Mantle was 35-years-old and on his last legs. Then I thought about Mantle’s career as a whole and I remembered looking some of his numbers from his MVP winning years – 1956, 1957 and 1962 – when I was researching for another post. So I decided to take a look again at his stats and I was amazed.

All fans of the New York Yankees, young and old, know that Mickey Mantle was quite a player and I thought for this post, I’d focus on one of those MVP years in particular.

Now, I am not one to mince words. I’ve never been afraid to say what I feel, no matter how harsh, and the two words that came to mind when I looked at Mickey Mantle’s 1956 season stats were “Holy” and oh, okay I’ll censor myself, the other word rhymes with sit.

First up, Mantle’s slash line: .353/.464/.705/.1169

See what I mean?

Let’s not even look at his batting average, let’s focus on his OPS – which is his on base percentage + slugging (.464/.705). Those are pretty gaudy numbers. What’s even crazier is that Ted Williams of the Red Sox, who finished sixth in MVP voting that year, had an even higher on base percentage (.479) than Mantle.

This statistic normalizes a player’s OPS — it adjusts for small variables that might affect OPS scores (e.g. park effects) and puts the statistic on an easy-to-understand scale. A 100 OPS+ is league average, and each point up or down is one percentage point above or below league average. In other words, if a player had a 90 OPS+ last season, that means their OPS was 10% below league average.

So league average OPS+ is 100. In 1956, Mickey Mantle’s was 210. But get this, his OPS+ was even better the next year when it was 221.

Some saberists don’t like OPS or OPS+ – they deem them to be too simple which truthfully, they are, since I understand them perfectly. (Haha)

Those same people like to look at a stat called wOBA – which stands for Weighted On-Base Average.

The weights in which you measure wOBA vary from year to year. SB Nation’s Beyond the Boxscore goes into great detail and shows the weights for every year from 1871-2010.

Fangraphs’s rule of thumb is that a wOBA of 0.400 is excellent. Well, in 1956, Mickey Mantle’s wOBA was .502. Amazingly, that was not the highest of his career. He’d do better in 1957 with an wOBA of .504.

Next up: Mantle’s 11.1 WAR

This is another stat that according to some, has seen it’s day come and go. But I’m still going to talk about it anyway because as long as it’s listed on Baseball Reference and Fangraphs, it counts.

I think it’s safe to say that Mantle led everyone in baseball in this stat and he did so by a pretty large margin. Early Wynnof the Cleveland Indians finished second with a WAR of 8.0 – Wynn was a pitcher. The next offensive player on the list in WAR was Mantle’s teammate Yogi Berra who finished with a 7.6.

Now for some simple numbers…

Walks: 112

Mantle led the league in walks, Williams finished in second with 102 of his own and third on the list was Roy Sievers of the Washington Senators who walked 100 times but finished 31st in MVP voting that year – he only had one vote. Interesting to note, Mantle was intentionally walked six times in 1956. That number increased the following season when he was given a free pass 21 times.

Home runs and RBI: 52 and 130

I know these stats are not as important anymore but they were in 1956 and they’re probably what helped Mantle get his first of three MVP Awards. His average combined with his home runs and RBI helped him achieve the Triple Crown – something that is not done too often.

Mickey Mantle followed up his amazing 1956 with an equally astounding 1957 season, helping him win back-to-back MVP Awards and leading the New York Yankees to back-to-back American League Pennants. The Yankees won the World Series four games to three over the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956 and lost four games to three to the Milwaukee Braves in 1957.

Mantle would go on to play until 1968 and was elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974 appearing on 321 out of 365 ballots.